Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Fundamentalism – religious and psychoanalytic
Black distinguishes between mythical religions (Buddhism, Hinduism) and monotheistic
religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam), noting that psychoanalysis found it much easier to
engage with the mythical religion, a view shared by half the interviewees. Psychoanalysis’
difficulty with monotheistic religion is an inability to engage with fundamentalism and post
9/11 terrorism (Jones 2002a; O'Neil and Akhtar 2009). Lemma notes a trend,
picking up people’s thinking and my own interests at the level of fundamentalist
beliefs … that’s entered much more the zeitgeist … obviously it is about religion in
a way, but it’s not at all about religion … the way in which people can engage with
religious beliefs to justify or enact certain particular internalized object relationships
(AL 895-500).
Fundamentalism concerns AN as it: places someone outside the influence of
psychoanalysis; confirms a psychoanalytic critique of pathology and domination of a super-
ego; leads to an externalization of the violence done to a person within; is viewed as an
underlying principle behind wars and other atrocities, mentioning the Nazi regime – hence
some awareness that not all fundamentalism is religious in origin. Several psychoanalysts
noted the fundamentalism of Kleinian approaches,
its very dogma bound … preoccupied with … a very unfortunate kind of Kleinian
influence or Kleinian shadow that’s fallen across the whole of British psychoanalytic
thinking … which leaves many analysts to focus on very negative parts of … human
beings … on destructive parts and I think with very … little space for
communication about spiritual concerns or higher strivings of human beings’ (PM
54-58). 463
There is an implicit ‘functional atheism’ to psychoanalytic fundamentalism, ‘I think a lot of
analysts would react with some anxiety, hostility even scorn, they might try to conceal it,
but I think it’s there’ (PM 382-384). Phillips’ perspective links the internal and external
463 Grotstein expressed concern at fundamentalist attitudes of British Kleinians that rejected Bion’s later work,
as well as the abuse of power experienced in some psychoanalytic institutes, the American Psychoanalytic
Association and the International Psychoanalytic Association (Grotstein 2002a, 2007, 2009a).
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